Nowadays, awareness of protecting the environment by recycling of resources or cutting down of a waste of resources etc., is growing on a global scale, and processing for separating resources has become popular.
In an image processing apparatus such as a laser printer, JP-A-2005-255358 describes a technique of separating recording media, such as sheets, in accordance with the type of a recording medium, a ratio of a print area to an area of a recording medium, or the like.
The image forming apparatus as described in JP-A-255358 uses recording media equipped with IC tags capable of storing information, thereby separating the recording media from each other in accordance with information read from the IC tags.
However, in JP-A-2005-255358, recording media are separated without consideration of an image to be printed on a recording medium. Therefore, for instance, a recording medium on which confidential information is printed can be mixed in the recording media separated as high quality sheets.
For this reason, confidential documents separated as high quality sheets can be recycled without being disposed of, thereby increasing the risk of leakage of confidential information.